nathandemick.com

Recently I was tasked with developing an Apple Watch extension for an existing
iOS app. Since I have no interest in Apple Watch, I’d never taken the time to
use one, or investigate the development process. After about a month of banging
my head against the keyboard (in a metaphorical sense), I thought I would
complain about my experience on the intarnets.

First of all, Xcode won’t install development builds if the watch is locked, and the watch
locks itself on sleep when not being worn. So you basically have to be wear it
in order to do any sort of active development. Annoying if wearing something on
your wrist is irritating whilst typing.

Speaking of wearing the watch: the plastic band which is included with the cheapest watch is the absolute
worst. To secure the clasp, you need to thread the loose end of the strap in
such a way that the rubbery exterior rubs right against your wrist, catching
and pulling out every arm hair in its path.

When testing a watch app on the actual device, the app never launches automatically.
Xcode says it is running, but there’s no indication on the watch itself. My
technique here is to open an unreleated app, which seems to trigger something
and remind the watch that it’s supposed to be running the development target.

The watch simulator is no better. Apple Watch has two modes of interaction: touch and “Force Touch.” The simulator’s
default option is to differentiate between the two by using Apple’s new pressure-sensitive
trackpads (if available). Problem is, it doesn’t work. Then you need to switch
input modes by using a keyboard shortcut. Except the shortcut doesn’t always
work either. When trying to bring up a context menu, I’ll Cmd+Shift+2 to trigger
a “deep press,” then tap the simulator, and nothing happens. It seems to randomly
work on the 3rd or 4th try.

Communication between the watch and phone is slow and/or buggy. Even on the
simulator! I guess maybe they’re trying to totally emulate real-world behavior,
which in that case kudos all around. I will randomly get WCErrorCodeMessageReplyTimedOut
errors, then do the exact same thing a second later and have it work flawlessly.

Speaking of communication, you’ll probably want/need to communicate with the
parent iOS app from a number of the different views in your watch app. Problem
here is that only one WatchKit class can receive messages from the phone. So
you end up making your extension delegate the message-sending delegate as well,
and handle communication within the watch app by sending notifications everywhere.
For a simple app it might not be so bad, but that sort of architecture gets
unwieldy rather quickly. Maybe I’m just a dummy, but Apple’s documentation sure
doesn’t mention any other potential design patterns.

Speaking of documentation, Apple’s documentation is… not great. Many times there was no differentiation
between watchOS 2 and watchOS 3 APIs. I spent a ton of time finding out that
it is impossible to share UserDefaults between watch and phone. Problem is, it used
to be possible, and so I fiddled about implementing “solutions” that never worked.
I ran into two issues that the documentation makes no mention about. I don’t often ask questions on Stack Overflow, but did
for these particularproblems.
The answers I got were underwhelming, to say the least.

Basically, the entire process was death-by-one-thousand-cuts frustrating. I wasn’t
bullish on the entire concept of smartwatches, and if this is what the “best”
has to offer, I might be put off it for good.

Recently I had need of a way to find how “similar” a collection of images were. A classic
way to diff images is to take one, invert it’s colors, then draw it over the
second at 50% opacity. It’s pretty easy to do this in CSS.
If both images are the same, the resulting combination will be perfectly grey (rgb(128, 128, 128)).

Since we’re JavaScripting all the things
these days, I figured that this technique could be implemented in JS. Fortunately, HTML’s
<canvas> element has APIs that allow for easy access to raw pixel data of an
image. You can call getImageData on a canvas context, which will return an
object that contains an array of RGBA values for each pixel in the image. Using
that data, it’s easy to invert the image a canvas displays (subtract each color
value from 255), and also compare the resulting combined image.

The only real annoying bit is synchronizing loading each image, and also determining
how long the entire diff process took. To that end, I created a giant array of
promises, each of which was itself a promise for loading/comparing two images.
The resolution of the giant promise array concludes with a timestamp comparision.

Where sources is an array of image URLs, and results is an array of integers,
indicating similarity between two images in the source array. A value close to
zero indicates the two images are very similar, while a value closer to 128 shows
that they are very different.

The only downside to implementing this type of algorithm in JavaScript is that
it can take a very long time to compare two large images, as you are iterating
over each pixel in the image, twice. For two 8 megapixel images (e.g. taken by
your iPhone 5), that is 32 million pixels. As a proof of concept/toy/small
image diffing tool, it works pretty nicely though.

I was reminiscing to a co-worker about my time in Japan, and told him a story
that I’m not sure I’ve ever told anyone else. So, why not regale the internet
with pointless personal anecdotes?

For those who don’t know, I taught ESL in Japan from the summer of 2004-2005.
Somehow I had ended
up connecting with the owner of a private school that was located in
Utsunomiya.
Definitely something of a backwater locale, even though it’s only 60 miles
away from Tokyo. Most of my teaching was in the main office that was close to
the center of the city, but I also had to regularly commute to a satellite
office that was in nearby Tochigi
(bizarrely, on a rail line operated by a department store). The school I worked
for, being a small family-run business, had all ages of students: I sometimes
“taught” preschool kids, and my oldest student was a guy in his 80s (whenever
he missed a class I worried that he had died).

One of my students at this satellite office was a junior high student named
Moe (pronounced moh-ay). She was actually one of my better students; since
she was more fluent in English, our lessons were more high-level, and therefore
less boring for me. Towards the end of the 2005 school year, my Japanese co-worker
and I had finished a lesson with Moe, when she invited us both to a concert that
her school band was giving. While my co-worker demurred, I thought, “Why not?”
and told her I’d go (toward the end of my year-long contract, I’d determined
that I was not going to stay in Japan, so attempted to have a “try anything”
attitude during my remaining time).

The concert was on a Sunday, and the day before I was working in the Tochigi
office as usual (yes, I had to work on Saturdays,
and got Sunday/Monday off). Imagine my bemusement/concern when, at the end of the
day, my co-worker suddenly pulls out a giant bouquet of flowers. “Here, you can
give these to Moe.” she blathered. I worried about what people might think of a
20-something foreigner giving flowers to a young female student, but felt
obligated at the same time. Cursing her under my breath, I took the bouquet,
trying not to think about what I was going to do with it.

The next day, for the first time ever, I took the train to Tochigi for non-work-related
purposes, and walked to the school. It felt pretty weird to be commuting on my
day off. I ended up stuffing those damn flowers into my backpack, and figured
I’d worry about them later. As I walked into the school auditorium’s foyer, I
could almost hear people’s necks snapping as they turned to look at me. Of course,
I was the only non-Japanese person there. And I don’t know why I didn’t think of
it before, but of course it was an all girls school. The awkwardness of my
presence had just increased exponentially. I brazened it out and found an
inconspicuous seat near the back.

From what I remember, the concert itself was actually enjoyable. I didn’t go in
expecting too much (remembering my own school-age band concerts), but as you
might imagine, the Japanese always seem to take things to the next level. Not only was
the music played impeccably, they also threw in some choreographed movement with
their instruments.

After the thing ended, the students dispersed into the audience to receive
congratulations from their various family members, and I had to deliver that
albatross-like bouquet. Fortunately, I was able to hand it over pretty
inconspicuously, thanks to the crowd.

After the meet ‘n greet, the students were called back up to the stage for a
group photo. Imagine my chagrin when the photographer, seeing a white guy hanging
around, yelled, “Who’s he with?” When it became known that I was Moe’s English
teacher, he told me to get up on the stage for a photo, a suggestion that was
enthusiastically received by the girls themselves. “Jeez, you’re tall!” I
remember one remarking.

So, somewhere in Tochigi, there’s a photo of an all-girls junior high jazz band
with a nerdy guy standing in the middle of the group, trying desperately not to
look as awkward as he feels. Good times 😅.

I seem to continually have dalliances with the Android world. Last year I bought
(then sold) a Sony Xperia Z3, then later purchased/returned an LG Nexus 5X.
I always seem to end up going back to my trusty iPhone 5, though. There are
just enough dealbreakers with any Android phone that make them tough to live with
as a daily driver.

Earlier this spring, I was revamping a few of my iOS apps, and figured that
since they’re written using JavaScript and published as “apps” in a Cordova
wrapper, I might as well try publishing on Google Play as well. I’d returned my
Nexus 5X long ago, so started trolling Swappa for a used
Android phone. I’d had my eye on the Xperia Z3 compact for a while: its stylish
design, coupled with a large screen inside a small(-ish) chassis had me itching
to try one out. I grabbed one for a decent price, released my apps
to absolutely zero downloads, and then tried using it as my main phone for a bit.

The thing that I love the best about the Z3 Compact is its screen-to-body ratio.
The whole device is just slightly larger than my iPhone 5, but the screen is
about 33% larger. Watching videos and reading books is much more enjoyable.
Plus, since the overall phone size is manageable, you can use it without
resorting to the “smartphone claw grip of death.” The body of the phone looks
pretty classy as well – I got the black version, which is like the prototypical
black slab that all other smartphones descend from. Unfortunately, Sony never
evolved its industrial design past the iPhone 4 era: the phone is all glass,
save for the plastic sides. I always treated it fairly gingerly, as I was never
sure how hard I could set it down without cracking the back.

Unfortunately, the software front is where most Android phones fall down for me.
While most of Google’s software is on point (Chrome, Gmail), the Android
messaging scene is pretty fragmented. What I want is a Google-endorsed
messenger that piggybacks on top of SMS, similar to Apple’s iMessage. The
app that might have fit that category (Hangouts) is deprecated, and users
are advised to use a standalone SMS app. Rather than double down on Hangouts,
Google instead is promoting two new messengers, Allo and Duo, that you’ll have
to get all your friends to download in order for them to be useful at all. Blah.
At that point I’d rather use Facebook Messenger, which at least most people
have installed.

Sony also tries to include a lot of “value-added” software, which is mostly
worthless. They have all sorts of extra media apps, but without a compelling
syncing solution for my Mac, I didn’t load any music or videos onto the phone’s
internal storage. A few bloatware-type apps (AR Fun, wtf) were immediately
disabled (can’t delete these apps, of course). I could sign up for a “My
Xperia” accout, but it’s not immediately apparent what benefit it would give me,
aside from yet another set of account details to remember (cursory internet
research tells me it’s similar to Apple’s Find My iPhone).

Dispite these annoyances, the phone was a pleasure to use, once I disabled/
uninstalled offending Sony software. Since I mostly rely on very basic
smartphone apps (Maps, Email, Browser, Books), I don’t mind missing out
on the hottest new iOS microtransaction bandit, errrr, game.

However, I ended up getting rid of the phone. Since my wife
has an iPhone, the lack of iMessage is a real killer. She’d try to send me a
video of the kids, and it would be sent as a hyper-compressed MMS. Static
images would fare no better. Rather a minor thing, but messaging is the
core of my smartphone use.

The other unfortunate thing is that the Z3 Compact has no upgrade path. It
shipped with Android 4.4, and has been (slowly) upgraded through Android 6,
but it’s anyone’s guess how much longer it will receive updates. While my
iPhone 5 is nearing the end of its update life (4 years!), I know that I can
buy a new phone with updated internals in the exact same form factor, and
have it be supported for another 3+ years. The Z3 Compact has no obvious
successor. Sony released the Z5 Compact last year, but it uses the problematic
Snapdragon 810 processor, and the US version has its fingerprint sensor
disabled(!). The Z5 Compact’s design is also a bit more stodgy. And the
Z5 series is the last of the Z’s – Sony’s recent crop of X-series phones
are about as forgettable as they come. I don’t want to get too attached to
a dying phone.

I guess I’ll appreciate the Z3 Compact for what it was at the time, and
hope that one day Apple will release an iPhone 5-sized device with an iPhone
6-sized screen.

Last year, when I ditched my managed hosting, I converted my blog to use Jekyll,
a static site generator. At the time I was pretty overwhelmed with all the tasks
necessary to move my digital life, and didn’t want to throw “configure PHP/MySQL”
onto the pile. Also, much to my chagrin, when I looked over my Wordpress installation
prior to exporting its content, I noticed a bunch of suspicious-looking files
that could only have been created by script kiddies exploiting Wordpress vulnerabilities.
I thought I had been pretty concientious in keeping my instance up to date, but
apparently not. So a static site it was.

One of the downsides to a static site is that… it’s static. No comments or
any other form of interactivity. At first I tried hooking up Disqus, which
I had actually also used in my Wordpress blog, rather than the native comments.
Problem is, I dislike Disqus. As with any free service, if you aren’t paying,
then you are the product. Managing a Disqus account is annoying, and it’s yet
another 3rd party service that gets to track you around the web. So, during a
bit of downtime, I created my own basic blog comments app.

It’s a Ruby app written with Sinatra that has two routes: GET and POST. Comments
are stored in a SQLite database (I’m not anticipating heavy traffic). Include the
client-side script wherever you want your comments to appear in a post. It uses
reCAPTCHA for abuse prevention.

I learned a few things doing this project, including how to use nginx as a reverse
proxy (only used Apache before), create an Upstart init script (sigh), and
deploy a basic Ruby app on a VPS. It’s amazing how much of this stuff you don’t
have to do when working at a company with sysadmin folks XD.

It should be fairly easy for anyone to take this code, made a few minor modifications,
and run it for their own blog. I would also be happy to answer any questions
about getting it up and running… just leave me a comment!

Nonogram Madness!

Get addicted to a new type of puzzle — nonograms — in Nonogram Madness!

Shikaku Madness!

Another Japanese puzzle game — cover the puzzle grid with rectangles,
using the provided clues as guidance!

Let's Build Bridges!

Connect all the islands together, using the number of bridges shown
on each one. It's harder than it looks!

Consume!

If you're in the market for imported or pre-owned
(or pre-owned imported) games, check out Play Asia.
I've gotten a lot of good junk from 'em. If you buy something
using the link above, I get whole pennies of referral credit!